A troubling trend
The murder of 77-year-old Ann Prazniak in her south Minneapolis apartment in 1998 was an extremely callous act, reflective of the depravity that consumed the crack addicts who killed her.
Sadly, Prazniak and her next of kin are all gone, as are most of the police investigators, prosecutors, and judges who dealt with the case – after 27 years nearly all are retired, and some have passed away. There just aren’t that many people who had a personal or professional connection to the case that remain, and that’s concerning in light of the recent announcement about the case.
Last week Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty announced that her office would be “joining” a petition by the Great North Innocence Project (GNIP) to vacate the conviction of Bryan Keith Hooper, the man ultimately convicted of murdering Prazniak.
Given the unusual position taken by the HCAO, effectively abdicating its role as an adversary to the petition, it’s more important than ever that someone steps up on behalf of Prazniak, and the countless other victims for which convictions obtained on their behalf are now less secure. The HCAO and the court need to know that people care about this petition, and that people are paying attention to how it will be resolved.
The effort to vacate Hooper’s conviction will play out in an upcoming hearing in Hennepin County District Court. According to Moriarty, the effort has received newfound credibility in the form of a purported confession by Hooper’s accomplice, Chalaka Young, albeit 27 years after the fact.
The concern is that the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office (HCAO) will make only a perfunctory examination of the information presented by the petitioner, GNIP. In doing so, the HCAO will undermine the critical role our adversarial system of justice demands of it – to conduct probing examination and make robust arguments challenging the petition, so that the Hennepin County District Court has the best information available with which to base its ruling.
The complete set of facts surrounding Prazniak’s murder, Hooper’s trial, and his prior efforts to seek relief need to be thoroughly presented and examined during the hearing– not just the recent purported confession by Young (which by the way is in seriously conflict with the physical evidence in the case).
A recent example, in which the HCAO “joined” a similar effort by the GNIP to provide postconviction relief in the decades old murder conviction of Marvin Haynes, provides us with the blueprint for what we can expect in Hooper’s petition hearing. The HCAO will lie down and abdicate its adversarial role – and justice will suffer as a result. This is a troubling trend.
The Haynes case was similar to the Hooper case in several respects. First the immediate family of the victim, including his sister who was a key witness to the murder, were no longer alive. The investigators and prosecutors had also retired and moved on. Few if any people associated with the case remained in place to oppose Moriarty’s efforts to free Haynes. Second, the effort to free Haynes centered on witness identifications and testimony that the GNIP and the HCAO discredited decades later in the hearing. The relitigating of identifications and testimony that were gathered and vetted contemporaneously with the murder, should only be allowed in the most clear-cut situations involving, for example, incontrovertible DNA evidence.
Mike Furnstahl, the retired Assistant Hennepin County Attorney who prosecuted Haynes had this to say about the HCAO’s work under Moriarty to free Haynes:
“Many egregious things happened during that hearing, not the least of which was that the prosecutors were instructed to not contest Haynes’ evidence. Essentially, they were told to “take a dive.”
By allowing this, Moriarity abdicated her responsibilities as chief prosecutor and allowed a guilty man to go free. Haynes is now seeking thousands of dollars in taxpayer monies for the time he was imprisoned. In the end he will have murdered an innocent man, gotten away with it, and become a millionaire for doing it. That’s Mary Moriarty’s definition of justice.”
As one of the few people was has actually read the 964 pages of Hooper’s trial transcripts, reviewed Hooper’s five previous efforts to seek post-conviction relief (all of which have been denied), and reviewed the recent petition filed by the Great North Innocence Project (GNIP) on behalf of Hooper, I implore Judge Chou to ensure the process used during Hooper’s upcoming hearing involves robust examination, challenges to claims, and a thorough litigation of all the facts in a healthy and adversarial manner – as our system of justice demands.
If that process is adhered to, the facts will show that the recent purported “confession” by Young does not exonerate Hooper but confirms the facts of the original trial which showed Hooper and Young were both involved in Prazniak’s murder and continued to use her apartment for their pleasure after her death.
The murder of Ann Prazniak
In March of 1998, Ann Prazniak was assaulted in her Minneapolis apartment, stuffed in a cardboard box, and left to die in her bedroom closet. Her decomposing body remained there for weeks while a group of crack addicts took over her apartment to smoke crack and take part in prostitution.
Prazniak’s apartment, 31, was located on the third floor of an apartment building at 1818 Park Ave South, in Minneapolis. The surrounding neighborhood was a notorious part of town known by police and drug users as “The Zone.”
Bryan Hooper, then 27, and Chalaka Lewis (now Young), then 23 and five months pregnant, were among a total of ten crack addicts who police identified as participating in the “take over” of Prazniak’s apartment throughout this period. Many of them were charged with burglary as the investigation unfolded.
By the time Prazniak’s body was found on April 15th, several weeks after she was killed, the body was severely decomposed, and the smell was permeating throughout the apartment and the entire building.
You decide how “innocent” and unaware any of those who frequented the apartment really were to Prazniak’s murder, or to who killed her.
The Investigation
The autopsy revealed Prazniak had been beaten and suffered a broken rib and several bruises about her body. The killer(s) had wrapped Prazniak’s mouth and nose with tape while she was still alive. Her wrists and ankles were bound together. She was wrapped in bedding and plastic bags. She was then put headfirst into a cardboard box which was wrapped in a strand of Christmas lights to keep it secured. The box was then pushed into the bedroom closet and covered with clothing. Prazniak was left there to die and decompose while crack addicts “set up shop” in her apartment to use and sell crack and conduct prostitution.
The physical effort to assault and overcome Prazniak, then to bind and place her in a cardboard box, and finally to move that box into the bedroom closet was no simple task. Consider the effort it took when evaluating who could have physically pulled it off.
The medical examiner ruled Prazniak died of “homicidal violence” by way of “external airway occlusion” (smothering). She was alive after being assaulted and died after having her mouth and nose taped and being dumped headfirst into a cardboard box.
Investigators began developing a timeline for the murder and determining who had been in Prazniak’s apartment around the time of her murder.
Investigators learned that Prazniak had gone to her bank on Friday March 20th, 1998, because she was concerned with someone possibly forging her checks. She was supposed to come back on March 21st but never made the appointment.
Investigators learned from Young, that Hooper had given her the checks around this time while out in “The Zone.” Young forged a few of the checks at a Super American nearby.
Forensic testing showed that Hooper’s fingerprints were on a beer can and two baggies associated with drug paraphernalia found on a table in Prazniak’s living room. Young’s fingerprints were found on two strips of tape found in the living room that were similar to the tape used to cover Prazniak’s mouth and nose.
Several more identifiable fingerprints were found in the apartment belonging to eight others who were implicated in using Prazniak’s apartment to smoke crack and participate in prostitution about the time of her murder. One of those people, Vonda Quass, left fingerprints on plastic bags similar to those in which Prazniak was placed in before she was dumped headfirst into the cardboard box. Another was a woman named Tammy Nye, who was apparently never located and did not testify.
DNA testing was not advanced at the time, and it appears it was not used in this case. Subsequent DNA testing has not been conducted because of the level of decomposition Prazniak’s body was in, and the deterioration of any biological evidence. (Advancements in DNA technology continue, but it’s unclear whether future testing is advisable).
Investigators interviewed several people, including Young, who approached police in “The Zone” on April 15th while a police presence developed after Prazniak’s body was found. She voluntarily went downtown to the homicide unit and took part in the first of several interviews with investigators. She told investigators that a few weeks earlier she had been in 1818 Park and saw Hooper in the doorway of Prazniak’s apartment with a white female named “Tammy.” Throughout several interviews, Young eventually acknowledged being present during Prazniak’s murder, acting as a lookout but not actually seeing the murder. She also acknowledged acting as an unwilling accomplice by tearing off strips of tape for Hooper and cleaning up the apartment at Hooper’s direction so he could sell crack out of the apartment.
According to court records, Young said that on the night Prazniak was murdered, Young was in the apartment building to smoke crack in the hallway near Prazniak’s apartment. Hooper asked her to be a “look out” for him. They went into Prazniak’s apartment, and Young stood as a lookout at the apartment door while Hooper went into Prazniak’s bedroom. Young heard a woman cry out for help – she claimed she wasn’t sure if it was “Tammy” or who it was. Young got scared and tried to leave, but Hooper threatened her and paid Young with crack, to stick around and help him. Hooper had Young tear a roll of tape into strips. Hooper took the strips into the bedroom, and Young heard “rumbling and bumping noises.” Hooper then had Young straighten up the apartment, so he could use the apartment to sell crack. When Young went into the bedroom, there was no one there, but the bedroom closet was sealed shut by means of a knife wedged into the door jam.
Investigators and prosecutors knew Young’s information alone was not sufficient to try Hooper.
Investigators searched for Hooper. They learned he was staying with a girlfriend and went to the house to locate him. Hooper tried to hide his identity by giving a fake name, but eventually confirmed he was Bryan Hooper. Hooper admitted that he had recently been in Prazniak’s apartment approximately three times with various people including Young to smoke crack. Hooper said the only time he ever had contact with Prazniak was in the apartment building hallway on a previous occasion when he helped her bring garbage down the stairs. Investigators later learned from a friend of Prazniak that she had seen Hooper inside of Prazniak’s apartment a year before her death.
A critical part of Hooper’s interview with investigators came when he described being in Prazniak’s apartment in recent weeks. He told investigators that he had walked throughout the apartment and mentioned that he never saw a large “box.” Hooper brought the subject up before investigators had ever discussed that Prazniak had been found in a box.
Hooper and Young were each charged with burglary of Prazniak’s apartment while the investigation continued.
Throughout the investigation, four independent witnesses came forward with information about statements Hooper had made to them about having “accidentally” killed “the old bitch,” and of not wanting to be in the apartment due to the smell.
Hooper told witnesses that he had gone to Prazniak’s apartment with “his girl,” and that Prazniak had become upset that Hooper for not paying her money for selling crack out of her apartment. Prazniak tried to push Hooper out of the apartment, and he “snapped” and “swung on her,” accidentally killed her.
The witness statements and their eventual testimony were not perfectly synchronized, which is the norm in a prosecution involving a group of crack addict witnesses. The witnesses had problematic histories, but aspects of their statements were independently corroborated, and the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office (HCAO) deemed their testimony reliable.
Another witness, Terry Edwards, whose fingerprints were also found in Prazniak’s apartment gave a statement to investigators claiming Young had told him that she had accidentally killed “the old woman” during a struggle inside the apartment. When Edwards was eventually charged with burglary for being in Prazniak’s apartment, he recanted his story and said he had made it up.
The prosecution of Bryan Hooper
Based on the evidence collected, prosecutors determined the best course of action was to seek a murder indictment against Hooper and use Young, who had been a reluctant accomplice, as witness against Hooper. Consideration of which of the two was more likely to have physically assaulted Prazniak (breaking her rib), then bound and taped her up while still alive, before lifting and placing her headfirst into the cardboard box, obviously was a significant part in the decision to prosecute Hooper and use Young as an unindicted accomplice/witness.
Evidence showed that Young was a present, but reluctant accomplice to Hooper. To secure her testimony, prosecutors entered into a plea agreement with Young, giving her immunity from prosecution in the murder if she plead guilty to burglary and testified against Hooper. That is not an unusual agreement in such a case.
The HCAO presented their evidence to a grand jury which handed down a first-degree murder indictment against Hooper. In October 1998, a trial was held and a jury convicted Hooper of Prazniak’s murder after just one day of deliberation. The trial judge sentenced Hooper to life in prison, where he remains to this day.
Hooper’s attempts to vacate his conviction
In 1999, Hooper began appealing his conviction and filing petitions for post-conviction relief. These appeals and petitions have spanned 21 years and have been considered by the Minnesota Supreme Court, the United States District Court for the District of Minnesota, and the Minnesota District Court.
In all, five separate petitions were reviewed, and Hooper’s arguments were denied each time. Some of petitions included purported “recanted” statements from three of the trial witnesses and a new statement from a witness that purported to offer exculpatory evidence helpful to Hooper. The reviewing courts determined that the supposed “recanted” statements either didn’t rise to the level of a true recantation or were not credible recantations, and that the new exculpatory testimony was not credible as it did not fit with the timeline of the case and could not be corroborated.
Hennepin County District Court Judge Nicole Engisch summarized Hooper’s efforts to clear himself in her May 2020 order following Hooper’s fifth attempt.
“This matter represents Petitioner’s fifth postconviction petition since his trial concluded over 20 years ago. During trial, on appeal, and in all prior postconviction proceedings, Petitioner was represented by counsel, Jeffrey C. Dean. Petitioner is now pro se, but he raises many of the same issues that he raised previously. The district court addressed these claims, including after holding evidentiary hearings, and in four separate decisions, the Minnesota Supreme Court has affirmed denial of the claims. Petitioner’s claims and requests are otherwise procedurally barred because even if the claims and requests were not brought previously, he has shown no reason why they could not have been brought, and the statute of limitations has long since expired. While Petitioner has attempted to argue exceptions to the procedural bars, he has not met any of the narrow exceptions. Despite the procedural bars, the court has considered his ineffective assistance of counsel claims, as well as his request for DNA testing, discovery, a stay, and an evidentiary hearing, and his claims and requests are without merit.”
The Hennepin County Attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit
Moriarty took office as the Hennepin County Attorney in January 2023. One of her priorities was to establish a Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU) to reinvestigate claims of wrongful convictions.
The CIU became active in the fall of 2024, and since that time has:
- Accepted 165 applications for review
- Completed initial review of 116 cases
- Marked for closing – 48 cases
- In queue for full investigation – 54 cases
- In active full investigation – 14 cases
One of the cases the CIU accepted for review was the Hooper case – despite the five times his conviction had received court review and had been affirmed.
The efforts of the CIU have become uncomfortably intertwined with the efforts of the GNIP. Consider that Andrew Markquart, the former GNIP lawyer who represented Marvin Haynes, is now working for the HCAO as the head of the CIU. That close relationship is problematic, as it blurs the line that should exist between parties, and undermines the adversarial approach our justice system depends upon to operate effectively.
Young’s “confession”
On August 12th, 2025, Moriarty announced that Young had come forward from prison in Georgia to “confess” that she had killed Prazniak.
From the portions of the “confession” that the GNIP chose to document in their petition to vacate, the confession does not, as the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office suggests, provide an “extraordinarily compelling” confession to Prazniak’s murder. Instead, Young says she was in the apartment building at 1818 Park Avenue when Prazniak came home from the store. Young, who was smoking crack, asked Prazniak if she had anything to drink, and Prazniak allowed her into the apartment and gave her a glass of gin. Young then claims she blacked out. When she woke up Young was on the couch crying and asking God to forgive her. Young got up and found Prazniak on the floor, “dead.” She then panicked and left the apartment to get more crack before returning. Young said she “stayed as high as I could because to come down was too devastating for my mind.” She claims she eventually decided to “tape up the body put it in a box and shove it in the closet.”
Young now claims that when the police began questioning her in 1998 about Prazniak’s murder, she just came up with Hooper’s name even though she had only met him once.
Concerning Young’s “confession:”
- The “confession” doesn’t offer details of the actual murder. Young says she blacked out and when she awoke, she found Prazniak’s dead body lying in the apartment and assumes she committed the murder because she was alone.
- Young might believe her confession is true, and portions of it might be true, but it involves a 27-year-old memory from a person who was, at the time, chronically high on crack and blacking out due to a combination of crack and alcohol.
- Young was a five months pregnant, making it highly unlikely that she alone brutally assaulted, for no known reason, a 77-year-old woman who had been kind to her, taped her mouth and nose shut while she was still alive, bound her in bedding and plastic bags, picked the woman up and placed her headfirst into a cardboard box, and then put the box in a closet.
- Young’s statement suggests that when she found Prazniak, she was already dead and lying on the floor. According to Young, a significant amount of time passed before she decided to tape up Prasniak’s mouth and nose, including coming and going from the apartment to buy and smoke crack. That directly contradicts the evidence from the medical examiner who determined Prazniak was still alive when she was taped up and was subsequently smothered.
- The GNIP suggests that Young’s confession “provided a previously unknown detail: ‘I had to use like a, a picture frame or something to help me put it (the body) in a box.’” This is NOT a previously unknown detail. Both Young and Hooper had mentioned a picture frame in the bedroom where the murder took place. Young mentioned the frame when describing for police the items she saw in the bedroom when Hooper had her clean the bedroom up after the murder. Hooper told police about the picture frame when telling police what items they might find his fingerprints on. Cleary, both Young and Hooper knew about the significance of the picture frame – because they were both involved in the murder.
Concerning the other portions of the CIU and GNIP re-investigation:
- They suggest that all of the witnesses against Hooper have recanted their testimony over the years. However, they don’t offer any specific statements of those recantations or under what circumstances they were obtained. They also don’t offer any legal reasoning why these supposed recantations should be considered now, when each of the courts that have considered them in the past have determined the recantations were not credible.
- Only two of the four witnesses that have supposedly recanted their statement have been found during their recent re-investigation. A third has died, and the fourth has not been found.
- They point to the fact that “Tammy” was never found and suggest this is evidence that Young’s original statement and testimony were false. However, fingerprint evidence demonstrated conclusively that a “Tammy Nye” had been in Prazniak’s apartment.
- Young’s written confession was followed up by an interview conducted by a Georgia Bureau of Investigations investigator, then by a phone interview conducted by a Minneapolis Police investigator, and finally by a CIU investigator. The content of those interviews is weakly summarized as simply “confirming” what Young had written in her “confession” letter. Some level of corroboration is needed to add credibility to Young’s confession, yet very little corroboration is offered.
- The CIU and GNIP are invested in exonerating defendants like Hooper. It’s the entire purpose of their existence. Young has come forward with information that puts her in the thick of Prazniak’s murder. Yet there seems to be zero curiosity or willingness to consider that Hooper and Young were both involved in Prazniak’s murder – which had been proven during trial. Instead, they consider Young’s information only for how it benefits Hooper (and their exoneration rate). That lack of curiosity and inquiry is telling, and troubling, and is ironically similar to the “tunnel vision” defense attorneys frequently suggest police and prosecutors suffer from in their efforts to convict.
- They assign 100% credibility to Young’s confession 27 years after the fact; by claiming she has no reason to lie and everything to lose. That’s certainly debatable. Stranger things have happened for reasons we cannot always understand, and even so, Young’s “confession” does not clearly and factually exonerate Hooper. This only supports the need for a robust examination of all the facts, through a properly conducted adversarial examination process.
- The reinvestigation fails to explain why Young chose Hooper to pin the murder on, and why four other witnesses, each unknown to the other, just happened to also implicate Hooper.
- What makes most sense is that Young and Hooper were both involved in Prazniak’s murder. This is exactly what the prosecution proved in 1998 during Hooper’s trial. A trial that appropriately took place contemporaneously with the events – not a defense cobbled together 27 years after the fact and based on the guilt-ridden recollections of a former crack addict and proven accomplice to the murder, who had been given immunity to testify as such.
Summary
Ann Prazniak, a 77-year-old woman, was murdered and disposed of in a terrible and dehumanizing way. Those who murdered her then callously took over her apartment to use and sell crack until the odor of her decomposing body became too much to handle.
Contemporaneously with the events, the police investigated and the HCAO successfully prosecuted Hooper for the murder. The HCAO made the calculated decision to offer Young immunity from prosecution as the evidence showed she was a lessor involved party.
Hooper was indicted by a grand jury and convicted by a trial jury. He has had five previous attempts at post-conviction relief reviewed by various courts including the Minnesota Supreme Court. Each of those legal reviews has denied Hooper’s claims and upheld his conviction.
Now, 27 years later, Young has come forward out of supposed guilt in an attempt to claim full responsibility for Prazniak’s murder and exonerate Hooper. Young’s “confession” has significant holes that include a black out period during the actual murder. The “confession” should not be viewed as some tsunami of evidence that destroys all previously admitted evidence against Hooper.
The new claims must be evaluated and scrutinized in concert with the trial evidence collected contemporaneously with the events – evidence that has withstood numerous legal challenges, and evidence that clearly showed both Hooper AND Young were involved in Prazniak’s murder.
Most importantly, the new claims need to be robustly challenged by the HCAO in a properly conducted adversarial based hearing. If the HCAO fails to meet this obligation, the Hennepin County District Court must ensure that role is filled. Ann Prazniak, and countless other victims, deserve no less.
